Give HND hold­ers a breath­ing space

It was on June, 2nd 2017, the Nige­rian Se­nate re­solved to pass a bill that give equal op­por­tu­nity for HND hold­ers to head the pro­posed Fed­eral Road Au­thor­ity (FRA), just like their coun­ter­part, the hold­ers of a bach­e­lor’s de­gree, but to most peo­ple sur­prise a sen­a­tor rep­re­sent­ing EDO cen­tral, sen­a­tor Clifford Or­dia came out in full force and with all his strength to­wards op­pos­ing the move with his rea­son that is clearly a sen­ti­ment and self­ish.

His rea­son is that “Univer­sity grad­u­ates are En­gi­neers while polytech­nic grad­u­ates are just Tech­nol­o­gist”, this is just his rea­son.

I have a hun­dred and one rea­sons why there is no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of any kind to place a bach­e­lor’s de­gree above HND, but for now I will make it an­other topic for an­other day, let me now re­strict my­self to the point the dis­tin­guish sen­a­tor raised as his rea­son, i.e “Univer­sity grad­u­ates are En­gi­neers while polytech­nic grad­u­ates are just Tech­nol­o­gist”.

Look­ing at the word “Tech­nol­ogy” which is one of the most im­por­tant in­dices of devel­op­ment, which sim­ply means that, for any na­tion to be con­sid­ered, de­vel­oped, it must be a tech­no­log­i­cally ad­vanced coun­try, the point here is that, de­vel­oped coun­tries where we copied the western ed­u­ca­tion from, con­sider Tech­nol­ogy with high es­teem.

In Nige­ria alone there are many uni­ver­si­ties of tech­nol­ogy that grad­u­ate en­gi­neers which sim­ply means that the so-called en­gi­neers are au­to­mat­i­cally the prod­uct of the tech­nol­ogy.

There­fore, sen­a­tor Or­dia can only jus­tify his claim to some ex­tent if and only if he is able to con­vinced the global com­mu­nity to re­place the “Tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance­ment with en­gi­neer­ing ad­vance­ment” as it is con­tained in the in­dices of devel­op­ment, as well as spon­sor­ing a bill that will even­tu­ally amend the Act es­tab­lish­ing the Uni­ver­si­ties of Tech­nol­ogy to uni­ver­si­ties of en­gi­neer­ing.

Fur­ther­more, those who took to them­selves a duty to down­grade and dis­grace HND qual­i­fi­ca­tion were at the same time, but un­con­sciously plac­ing the HND above their ex­ag­ger­ated bach­e­lor’s de­gree, for in­stance Univer­sity grad­u­ates of ad­min­is­tra­tion are em­ployed as an ad­min­is­tra­tive of­fi­cers while their coun­ter­part from Polytech­nic as ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cers just to show that HND is in­fe­rior to bach­e­lor’s de­gree, but if I may ask what is the ti­tle of the high­est of­fi­cer who oc­cu­pied the high­est of­fice in any or­ga­ni­za­tion? The an­swer is “chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer” (CEO), in­clud­ing the state gov­er­nors who are also re­fer to as chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cers of their re­spec­tive states, and to cap it all, the pres­i­dent of the Fed­eral Repub­lic of Nige­ria is also re­fer to as the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Fed­er­a­tion, in­stead of the “chief Ad­min­is­tra­tive of­fi­cer” that is re­served for only the bach­e­lor’s de­gree hold­ers.

Nev­er­the­less, the per­son Nige­ria and Nige­ri­ans re­quired to head the Fed­eral Road Au­thor­ity (FRA) is that per­son, who have the abil­ity and ca­pa­bil­i­ties to de­sign, con­struct and main­tain a struc­ture, ir­re­spec­tive of a Univer­sity or Polytech­nic She/he grad­u­ated, and re­gard­less of whether she/he is re­fer to as an En­gi­neer or a Tech­nol­o­gist.

In con­clu­sion, let me use this op­por­tu­nity to ex­tend my ab­so­lute grat­i­tude and ap­pre­ci­a­tion to the dis­tin­guish Sen­a­tor Kabiru Marafa and others who sup­ported him for their courage and de­ter­mi­na­tion to­wards chal­leng­ing the in­jus­tice to hu­man­ity of sen­a­tor Or­dia and his al­lied, in fact you did what is ex­pected of you and we are proud of you.

Fi­nally, I must also salute the firm­ness and dogged­ness of the cus­toms CG Hameed Ali for com­pletely abol­ish­ing the long ex­isted di­chotomy be­tween the HND/bach­e­lor’s de­gree that caused a lot of dam­age in the Nige­rian cus­toms ser­vice, with a hope that other or­ga­ni­za­tions will fol­low suit for the over­all in­ter­est of Nige­ria/ Nige­ri­ans.